The present invention relates to a method of searching a commercial message via a network, CM search-result receiving method, CM searching apparatus, CM search-result receiving apparatus, and a CM-recording programming system.
In the field of commercial television broadcasting, a commercial message (will be referred to as “CM” hereunder) as an effective means of advertising a commercial article or service to the consumers has been broadcasted in the past concomitantly with the main part of a TV program. Generally, since a CM broadcast is limited in length of time, however, so it cannot be said that the consumers watching the TV is provided with sufficient information on a commercial article or service advertised in the CM broadcast. To complement such insufficiency information, the article is displayed at the shops or a catalogue of the article is distributed to the consumers. Currently, since the Internet has been widely prevalent, many makers or distributors of commercial articles and service providers have their own Internet web sites where they provide information on their article and service. On the other hand, the consumer having seen a broadcast CM for a commercial article and wanting to get further information on the article itself, an actor or actress appearing in the CM, music used with the CM or the like will actually go to the store where that article is sold, get the catalog of the article, access the Internet web site or do otherwise.
Currently, however, a consumer having seen a TV-broadcast CM for a commercial article or service and wanting to get information on the CM has to write down the name of the company having put on the CM and the name of the article and go to the store where the article is sold, access the Internet web site of the company or do otherwise. The currently prevalent Internet service permits the consumer to easily access the Internet web site for making a search for various kinds of information. However, retrying a search for such information after seeing the TV will be rather troublesome to many of such consumers. Perhaps the consumers will not be able to get information such as necessary keyword for searching a CM broadcast for only a limited length of time as above.
To overcome the above-mentioned inconvenience, there was proposed, for example, a method in which a server can sequentially record CMs having ever been broadcasted and the user can acquire information on a desired CM by sending a time when the CM was broadcasted and a broadcast channel on which the CM was broadcasted to the server (see the Japanese Patent Application Laid Open No. 2002-10237, for example; this will be referred to as “Patent Document 1” hereunder).
There was also proposed, for example, a method in which a commercial-message part of a TV broadcast signal is detected or retrieved with a high accuracy by detecting, in an input signal, a candidate interval of a first signal on the basis of a signal-feature pattern taking place at predetermined time intervals, extracting a feature indicative of the likelihood of the first signal from input signals in, before and after the candidate interval, and detecting the interval of the first signal on the basis of the extracted feature (see the Japanese Patent Application Laid Open No. 2002-16873, for example; this will be referred to as “Patent Document 21” hereunder).
Further, there was proposed a method of detecting a user-desired reading position in a recorded video signal and/or audio signal for reproducing the signals, wherein with feature vectors of the video signal and/or audio signal having been recorded at the time of recording the signals and also with a feature vector corresponding to a signal position designated by the user, for example, having been registered when reproducing the recorded video signal and/or audio signal, a feature vector whose value of correlation with at least one of the registered feature vectors exceeds a predetermined threshold is detected in the feature vectors recorded in a recording means, a reading point is set on the basis of the detected feature vector, and the video signal and/or audio signal are reproduced starting at the reading point (see the Japanese Patent Application Laid Open No. 2003-339010, for example; this will be referred to as “Patent Document 3” hereunder).